In a letter to a former senator released this week, NSA leaker
Edward Snowden swore that there is no way the Russian government can get
any sensitive information from him — despite the fact that he has been
camped out in the Moscow airport for the past few weeks, carrying four
laptops that he had supposedly used to lift the NSA’s secrets.

“No intelligence service — not even our own — has the capacity to
compromise the secrets I continue to protect,” Snowden wrote to former
senator Gordon Humphrey, R-N.H., in an email published by the Guardian.
“You may rest easy knowing (that) I cannot be coerced into revealing
that information, even under torture.”

At first glance, the
message seems like more braggadocio from a man who has appeared to lay
it on thick before, from his self-proclaimed ability to bug the
president to his claims of being able to “shut down the surveillance
system in an afternoon.” It’s widely assumed in both the business and
the intelligence communities that any electronics brought into Moscow
(or Hong Kong, for that matter) are going to be compromised by the
country’s spy agency. Perhaps he is underestimating the technical
prowess of the Russian security services; perhaps he is overestimating
his own.

But there’s a third possibility: that Snowden is telling the
truth. That there really is no way for him to give up any more
information, other than the stuff in his head. Snowden may have left the
United States with “four computers that enabled him to gain access to
some of the U.S. government’s most highly classified secrets,” as the
Guardian put it. But he may not have those secrets now. The laptops
could very well be empty — and the secrets could be somewhere else.